From Intake Bottleneck to Instant Estimates: CARSTAR Torcam’s Tech Playbook

In this episode of The Collision Vision, Cole Strandberg chats with Sebastian Torres, a sharp family-business operator leading CARSTAR Torcam Group in Canada. When Sebastian took the reins, he challenged legacy habits and leaned into tech—adding Solera’s photo-capture estimating and mobile inspection so customers can leave with an estimate in hand. The result? Faster intake, cleaner repair plans, better documentation, and a noticeable lift in profitability. In this episode, they unpack the workflow changes at the front counter, the ROI math behind instant estimates, and—importantly—the leadership side: how to build the foundation for growth and know when the timing is right to scale across locations.

Cole Strandberg: Looking forward to an awesome conversation. At least in our kind of pre hitting recording conversation we have a lot of fun stuff to talk about. Some similarities in our background and upbringing. But before we dive into that, would love to hear your story leading up to where you are today.

Sebastian Torres: Yeah, absolutely. So I’m a second generation owner. I actually started in my dad’s shop. So you know we started kind of going through all the different departments, started in detail, moved over to the prep side, then I did a little bit of body work, not too much. I can’t call myself a licensed technician by any means that would disrespect my guys. But good background though. And then once I moved over to the parts department, I just started making my way through every facet of the shop. So learned how to manage the parts, then moved on to estimating. I would say estimating is actually my forte. That’s where I spent the most amount of time in. And from there I took it to office management and then production management up until where I am today.

Cole Strandberg: There we go. Awesome background, great foundation and a great segue into talk to us about where Cartar Tour Cam group is today.

Sebastian Torres: Yeah, so like talk about the group itself. It actually started with my dad and my mom. That’s where the second generation comes in. My dad actually used to wash cars in the same place that you know, he ended up purchasing. So dad’s been in the industry for over 20 years. I’ve been around it all my life. 2019, we decided that, you know, maybe we had enough experience to start growing a group and seeing where we can take it. So everybody kind of pulled money together and we were able to purchase the first store, which is 103 Copernicus Boulevard, along with the second, and we purchased two at once. But the second store wasn’t really a store. It was doing very, very little sales. And it was within the same city as well, only 10 minutes away. So we were able to get a very good deal for them. 2019 we started and we acquired the third location. 2021, 2024, we acquired the fourth, and now we’re opening up a fifth, coming in about three months.

Cole Strandberg: I would say, man, what an awesome growth story and an awesome founding story for the Tor Cam group. Talk to me about what exactly that decision making process looked like when you were ready to expand and become this regional MSO play.

Sebastian Torres: We always kind of had it in the back of our heads that we wanted more stores. It’s just we didn’t know. We’ve always been around, like, the MSO environment. So the group that we used to work with before, my dad was the vice president of operations for that group at one point, and they had around 13 to 14 stores. So we’ve always been in that environment. It’s just, you know, one thing is working in the environment already set up. Another thing is actually getting it done. So when we got the opportunity to do a third location, we said, okay, we feel pretty confident about the two, so let’s go ahead and. And let’s try to open up the third. And. And that was like a bucket of cold water. It’s one of those things where they say it’s easier said than done. So great learning experiences. I probably almost lost my whole set of hair during that time, even though I’m only 32.

Cole Strandberg: And it doesn’t look it, man. It doesn’t look.

Sebastian Torres: It’s. It’s lots of vegetables, man. I’ve grown. Was thinning, thinning out at one point. But no, I mean, you know, we. We learned a lot of things. And when we were ready to open up the fourth, I think we were a little bit more well versed on what we had to do. So that became kind of. I. I would say the real birth of the Tor Cam group happened right before the fourth store, because up until the third, when we were running the third, it was just separate silos. If you walked into one of my stores when we had the three of them, you wouldn’t see a similarity between any of them. Everybody was just kind of, you know, running wild. Right. So when we had the opportunity at the fourth, that’s when we kind of just sat down and. And, you know, I said, we. We need to standardize this. And obviously, if we want to go to 4, 5, 6, 7, whatever that number is, we need to treat ourselves like a little corporate, aside from our corporate. Right. And that’s kind of what the decisions led to, getting to the point we are today. Awesome.

Cole Strandberg: Yeah. I have conversations all the time about, all right, when are we ready to take that next step? When is that foundation strong enough to finally really build upon and think three stores is a lot to be running in different silos. What tactically does that involve where you were rethinking kind of the way you’ve always done it to. All right, here’s how we’re going to do it moving forward. What did that look like? What kind of sparked all that? And, yeah, how’d you have rubber Meet the road?

Sebastian Torres: Yeah. So I think the biggest issue was what I started realizing is I would spend time, like three to four months at each location because one location was always in trouble. So something. Something was on fire at any given time. So I just recall telling my team, you know, saying, okay, for these next two or three months, we’re going to fix Brantford. For these next two or three months, we’re going to fix West. And then by the time west was fixed, Brantford was already on fire again. So I go back to Brantford, and then it’s like, oh, Simcoe needs it. So, you know, I just started to realize, like, okay, if I have four and five stores, this is not sustainable. Right. We need to do something that essentially the stores can manage themselves and we can create, like, a shared services team that’s going to help the stores and help the managers so that they don’t feel like they’re alone and all they have to do is focus on cars. Right. So that’s where we kind of led to the creation of the Tor Cam group with. We started off with the review desk. So the review desk is the one that will send out all the stores, will do the files, they’ll take care of the estimates, everything like that. And at the end of it, it goes up to the review desk on the group side, and they review all the estimates before final billing. So pictures, any requirements, 3D measuring, alignments, anything you need on an estimate, that review does takes care of it, and that’s really where we started. And from that point on, we did an accounts receivable department, accounts payable department, hr, health and safety department for the group. And right now, the managers and the staff in the shop really just need to worry about fixing cars.

Cole Strandberg: That’s what it’s all about, fixing cars and fixing them in the right way. And it seems like you took a really proactive approach to kind of professionalizing and standardizing. Looking ahead, you hinted at, and I want to double click on some pain points and some real. All right, if you’re a customer going from one location to another, what are the differences and where did you see some of those pain points? Whether that was, you know, the front desk experience, all the way back to customer experience and communication, what were some of the big differentiators and what have you really focused on standardizing as one group?

Sebastian Torres: The biggest thing, honestly, is scheduling. It was horrible. It’s Brantford was taking in cars tomorrow and Simcoe was booking them out for three months. Right. So there was no standardized scheduling program. And on top of that as well, no load leveling program. So which is one of the things that we kind of looked at and we said, we have three locations. Like, why is this not happening? Right? Yeah.

Cole Strandberg: One of the beauties of scale, right?

Sebastian Torres: Yeah. So we really dove into both of those, which is going to be a big part of the conversation today.

Cole Strandberg: But, man, you are the master of good segues. I appreciate that. Talk to me about that. Some tech stack stuff. I know Solera came up in some of our pre show conversations. How did you use technology and what technology did you use to go ahead and get everybody on the same page?

Sebastian Torres: Yeah. So it’s funny because if I hadn’t spoken to Solera, I was already thinking of making that app myself, But I was in a conference, I believe. I can’t remember where it was. I want to say North Carolina. I can’t remember the. The exact location, but Bill Broward did a presentation and this was a few years back, and me and my father were both at that conference and we took a look and we said he was doing the presentation on how their. Their next step is going to be AI and AI estimated and at the time they mentioned that it was going to be a good training tool for the appraisers. And, you know, not knowing much about AI I’ve just seen it in the movies. I was like, okay, this is pretty cool, right? So my dad nudges me on the side of the arm and he goes, you need to go up and talk to that guy. And I said, I’m like, yeah, I think so. Let’s wait until he finishes and let me go.

Cole Strandberg: Now when was this roughly, by the way?

Sebastian Torres: Oh, this was, I want to say 23, either 22 or 23 early innings.

Cole Strandberg: Like long before any of us were talking about chat GPT.

Sebastian Torres: And, and yeah, no, there was none of that, man. Like, yeah, this was like, this seemed like a sci fi movie when he was up there talking about it. Like it was crazy. So I went up and I introduced myself and I said, hi Bill, my name’s Sebastian. You know, this is a great conversation that you’re having. How can I get my hands on this? And at the time it was just the pilot and he’s like, oh really, you, you know, you’d like to take a look? And I said, yes, absolutely I would. So we exchanged cell phone numbers and, and from there it took off. It was one simple conversation at a conference. The next thing you know, you know, Bill setting with some of the Solara crew. And I would like to mention at the time, which is kind of like silly now that you look back at it, but there was animosity towards the estimating companies. So not one shop would want to work with an estimating companies because there’s this wide belief that they’re, you know, we’re not on the same team. Right. So it was kind of very new for anybody to say, okay, why don’t we reach out to an estimating company and partner with them? Which is really the most logical option. Right. Like, why would you go with a third party when you can go with the one that manages it, you know, so, so that’s how that started.

Cole Strandberg: Awesome. Talk to me about that pilot. We talked again in our pre show call about kind of trying before in one location and getting a real sense of, all right, does this make sense? Is this working how we think it’s going to work? Before bringing that out to your broader group, talk to me about how that went and what exactly that product was doing for you and is doing for you today.

Sebastian Torres: Yeah, so the biggest things that we did was we, we got in touch with the software team, with the development team and we said, okay, what do we need here? And it’s funny because they, they didn’t really know either. They’re like, this is why we’re talking to you because we, we got to figure stuff out. Right? So I said, okay, what if we try it on tablets? I had tried tablets before, but my Internet was absolutely horrendous. So I said, you know, I, I think we can give this a shot. Because one of my dreams was I want all my employees operating on tablets, right? Like, I kind of, my dad was the guru of Excel spreadsheets and, you know, pen and paper, and I am just a little bit lazier than he is. So I wanted everything automated. So we said, let’s give it a shot in tablets. So the one thing that I realized going into it was our Internet was still not up to par. So I called my IT coordinator, which also happens to be my father in law, and he’s, he’s a phenomenal IT coordinator. And he went in there and he said, okay, let’s figure out how we can make this Internet better. And the first step was setting up the IT infrastructure so that we could watch a movie out in the backlot. So that’s literally what he focused on was, you know, routing cables, you know, putting up the router, everything that he needed to until he watched the movie in the backlot. And once that was done, then we were like, okay, we’re ready. And that’s how the pilot started.

Cole Strandberg: That is awesome. What a, what a great quantitative measure of your ability to execute there is. Can we watch a movie in the backlot? That’s fantastic. Now I want to, I want to dive into exactly what these products are doing for you guys, but a couple things before we jump in. Number one, and it might be kind of self explanatory, but I do want to double click on the fact that you, when you’re implementing new technology, you’re trying it in one store before you bring it out to your broader group. Why’d you land on doing it that way?

Sebastian Torres: You know, we do that for everything. So, like again, I mentioned my dad started washing cars and my mom started as a CSR in that Brantford location. So if there’s anything that we know better, it’s that, you know, like, it’s. We feel extremely comfortable in it. We know the workflow, we know how the location works. So rather than going to a location that we’ve just acquired within three to four years that we don’t have that much data in, why not stay at what we call head office, right? So not only that, but you know, when you’re trying to. And I feel bad for Michael Bernicke’s team, you know, bless those guys. But when we’re trying to get a new SOP on board, we got to figure out what the pain points are, right? And we kind of go, we have to go through that hell. I call it, you know, before we can go ahead to the other locations and say, hey guys, listen, we have something pretty good in our hands here that I think we need to start training on. Right. So one of the key people in my pilot were Nicola, the operations manager and Carissa, the office manager, which is now an operations manager at another location. So they were phenomenal. And, and they essentially used the, the tablet in any way, shape or form they could to kind of come up with those, you know, things that we needed to streamline. Right. So we just, everything that we do, regardless of whether it’s it or you know, production or any sop, we, we start it there. On the flip side of that, you know, hardware is expensive, so you don’t want to go and buy the wrong cables, the wrong router. You don’t want to do the wrong thing on four different stores and have that cost multiply. Like if you’re going to make a mistake, make it in one and then make it quick.

Cole Strandberg: Yeah, absolutely.

Sebastian Torres: Right.

Cole Strandberg: I love it, man. So you’ve mentioned your parents, you’ve mentioned your father in law as a fellow second gen family business person, albeit former in my case. Love the family business stories. Who all within your family have you worked with and who all are you working with today?

Sebastian Torres: We’re all in it, man.

Cole Strandberg: I love it.

Sebastian Torres: And it’s funny because it’s us and another family, the Avery family, shout out to those guys. Every single one of them is working with us as well. So I tell them that they compete with the ownership family. But you know, my wife runs the review desk, my sister’s just starting out in the review desk. My mom’s in charge of the finances, My brother in law is Cola, my father in law is the IT coordinator. You know, my mother in law helps out with the organization and cleaning of the location. So we’re all in it.

Cole Strandberg: Dude, that is awesome. You have me beat. I, I spent six years under one roof with, working with my dad, my mom and my wife. You’ve got me beat in spades, man. That is so cool. When family business works, it works so well and nobody more fun to be in the trenches with. No question about it. All right, so I want to walk through this kind of workflow redesign and how you thought about it as you’re really playing a role in developing this full pilot program. Walk us through the new intake now. I, I think that’s one thing on your end that was drastically influenced at least by some of these new products you brought in the door.

Sebastian Torres: So the biggest thing that was Actually influenced is not necessarily the intake of the drivable cars, but it’s the intake intake of the non drive. So we go back to scheduling being a pain point. And you know, we would always sit down and we would kind of, you know, share ideas and we’d say, why is scheduling such a pain point? I’m like, why can we not just grab all the cars coming in and put them on a schedule and say this is what we’re going to work on? And then one of my managers goes, yeah, because we get eight towins in one Monday. I said, I’m like, okay, fair, that’s a valid point. So I said, so our pain point isn’t scheduling, Our pain point is non drives. And they were like, yes. So when we got the pilot originally we were thinking about, you know, this is going to be an estimator training tool or this could potentially be like a, a cheaper way of hiring an estimator. And pretty quick we realized that this isn’t a replacement for an estimator. This is a tool, right? And as soon as you realize that this is a tool and you still need the human intervention, this is when this tool becomes very, very powerful. So when we started scheduling, before we had this tool, we were like, okay, well we need to write preliminary estimates on this cars, right? So we’d get seven, eight cars towed in on a Monday, and then we’d have the appraisers running like chickens with their heads cut off trying to write an estimate that takes really about an hour to an hour and a half, right? Once we had that preliminary estimate, we bring the estimate in only to find out they wrote it 75% correct. So there we were, we were wasting our time at that point. Like, what, what are you scheduling, right? Once we got this tool, I said, what if we use it as a scheduling tool and we started running it. So that’s where it got really, really cool because instead of taking an hour and a half, we had an estimate in 10, 15 minutes, right? So then the appraisers would go outside, they’d go with attack. They’d still need to take their pictures, they’d still need to take their notes, and then they’d come back. By the time they got to their desk after they had taken the pictures, the estimate was already there. So all they had to do is what we call grooming. So they go ahead and they groom the estimate for, okay, we’re at about a 75% confidence. How can we take it to a 95 or at least over 90 that’s how we started. So then the estimate would go with their notes, additional pictures, everything like that, and add what they needed to add. And in 20 to 25 minutes we have that car schedule. So instead of doing one car in an hour and a half, in an hour and a half, we could potentially do four to five. Right. For one estimator. Keep that in mind, you know.

Cole Strandberg: Yeah, yeah, no doubt. Zoom out for me real quick. You keep referring to this tool and I assume this is the outcome of your 2022, 2023 conversation with Bill and his team. Give me the quick spiel and rundown on what exactly this tool from Solera is and is doing for you guys.

Sebastian Torres: So it’s the mobile inspection app and we’re using it along with the vi. So the VI is the artificial intelligence. So it’s really two different things in one. Right. It’s two different products. So the mobile inspection app, what that allows us to do is download it on the tablet that I, that I was mentioning earlier, and you go outside and it’s a guided picture so you have access to all of your assignments. You can start an assignment from the tablet, you know, do everything you need to, and then it, it takes you to the next page where it’s guided picture format. So what it is, is, you know, it’ll tell you take a picture of the left front, take a picture of the right front, take, you know, VIN odometer, all the main pictures and take some good solid damage pictures. And then once you hit submit, if you have the vi, what the VI does, the visual intelligence is it creates the estimate for you. And that’s. Those are the two things that we’re using right now to do that.

Cole Strandberg: Man seems very powerful. And all the talk about AI, there’s a lot of fear, at least in the white collar world, a lot less so in the blue collar world of ultimately it’s going to be doing jobs for us, I think in the blue collar world, and I’m including collision repair in that sweeping generalization, it’s going to make our people a lot more productive is the end outcome. Have you found that to be the case? And kind of on a related note, how did people’s roles within the CSR world and the estimator world change with this tool coming into play, more relaxed?

Sebastian Torres: I did not chop down any staff. I kept the same stuff. If anything, they get paid more money now because we’re more profitable. But the, the change was positive all across the board. You know, it’s. I always look for ways Especially with my team to say, okay, how can we do the same job with less work? Again, going back to the little bit of the lazy comment, but you got to work smart, not hard. You know what I mean? And that’s what I tell everybody. Like how can we make the same job less stressful? And that’s this did. Is that exactly. Just that instead of the estimators having to go outside, take pictures, bring cars in, spend an hour and a half and get stressed out, we could potentially just schedule in those non drives and we know exactly what cars are going to come in that day. Right. So instead of writing seven, eight estimates in a day, we’re really only doing like four or five. Sometimes we do two, depending on what we need for the budget. You know, like if we have two really big hits, team of three estimators can take the whole day writing two hits. Sure. It doesn’t matter, right?

Cole Strandberg: No doubt, man. Very. You keep mentioning, you’ve mentioned twice at least a little bit of laziness. Nobody wants to be a lazy person. However, I will say a little spot sprinkle of laziness can make some real efficiencies work. Right. How do we work smarter and not harder to your point?

Sebastian Torres: Yeah, no, absolutely. Like it’s, I’ve always been like that. And, and I say that because my parents are going to listen to this, they’re going to hit me because I’ve always, I’ve always mentioned it but, but it’s true. It comes to the work smart, not hard. If you have 100 processes, how can you chop them down to 50? That’s the bottom line.

Cole Strandberg: There we go. Well, we were throwing some numbers out on, on time assumptions and I, I think it merits diving a little bit deeper into. Talk to me about before integrating this tool versus after. How much time savings are you finding? Is there any additional kind of revenue grab that you’re getting that could have been missed by more human error in the past? What’s the overall kind of quantitative benefit that you’ve seen in your business?

Sebastian Torres: Yeah. So to be honest with you, it all comes down to that saying, you know, time is money and the second you understand that, then that’s, you know, when everything starts to get better. A lot of people think, you know, we have to put in more cars through or, or we have to find a way to write more estimates in one day and you really don’t, you know what I mean? Like if you can scale it back and write less estimates, but write them proper and have a little bit more throughput on the cars on the long run, then that’s, that’s what’s going to give you the money. Right. Chopping down the time for the estimators having to write an estimate means that they can take a little bit longer if they needed to. So if we would take an hour and a half writing a 75 estimate, they could take 45 minutes writing 121, you know what I mean? So it goes down to documentation, it goes down to the time to add all of the admin things that we need to add nowadays. You know, everybody talks about the admin burden. Well, there’s tools to mitigate the admin burden nowadays, you know, and you just have to use them.

Cole Strandberg: There you go. Well, another key piece of writing proper estimates is in theory it should create more efficiency on the back end being able to order the right products at the right time, as early as possible to hopefully reduce cycle time, reduce touch time. Have you seen any benefit in the back end to these more kind of beefy estimates on the front end?

Sebastian Torres: Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, we go back about time and it’s having the time to write the non drive estimates. But what it also gave us is a little bit more time for the drivable. So one of the procedures that came about, you know, being able to have that time is we started doing what’s called a triage, so which is the first phase of what we did. And now we’re going into the second phase with the app, which I’ll explain a little later. But essentially what it is, is before a customer comes in to drop off their vehicle, you know, we take an hour and a half and we disassemble the vehicle and we take a look at everything that that car needs if it’s drivable, and then we can put it on the schedule. And once that car comes in, then we have all of the tools we need to fix it. Right. So it all comes from additional time that we had not dealing with those toll ins to adding a little bit more time on everything.

Cole Strandberg: Makes total sense. And on a related note, you said that, you know, this tool has helped your people essentially make more money because you’re making more money as best you can quantify where that additional margin or revenue or however you’re making more money kind of come in, came into play.

Sebastian Torres: Yeah, well it’s, you know, it’s no secret that your profitability is at the estimate. Everybody knows that. Right. So if you have an accurate estimate and that car goes through the shop accurately and your length of Rental is down and your touch time is up, then your throughput is going to be a little bit higher. Right. So with the same amount of people, you’re going to be able to put through a little bit more car, cars with more profitable estimates. You know, it’s one thing we realized as we set up the review desk and we set up these procedures is we were leaving a lot on the table simply because of no documentation. So we would do what they call working for free. Right. And it’s very true. And as soon as we were able to, you know, streamline these processes and start documenting things correctly, it’s not about charging more, it’s just about charging what you’re supposed to charge rather than not charging, charging it at all. Right, right on. That’s, that’s what the conversation always leads to. So, you know, more throughput, a little bit quicker on the, on the repair side and more profitable estimates. You know, obviously your sales and profit go up by itself.

Cole Strandberg: Yep. Hugely impactful. And it’s not rocket science. It’s not reinventing the wheel. Now, anytime you’re investing in something within the shop, whether that’s equipment or in this case technology, there has to be an ROI equation calculated. Right. There’s a cost plus, you know, potentially I would imagine, training time versus the additional margin gained or additional money gained. How do you view the ROI for this tool specifically?

Sebastian Torres: So I, I measure it a lot by, I, I, I’m a really big financial guy. So when it comes to my income statements, when it comes to my financial reports, you know, looking at the GB like those are, those are really big things that I do on a monthly basis. And I, I like a hawk. So yes, there was a little bit of fear because the investment portion was a little bit bigger on the first go around and of course the training and setting up, you know, the review desk and all of that stuff. But what I started realizing really quick is the first month, the profitability, the GP went up by about 2%. You know, second month came by, we were at about 2 to 3. And as it kept going around the 6 or 7 month, we were already scaling up to 6 to 7. So when we do want to talk about profitability, once you see a 6 to 7% increase on your GP, you’re, you’re laughing, you know, you just want to invest more at that point. So that’s where we take a look and we say, okay, we did phase one. How can we make phase two? So we started with a very simple investment. It was just two tablets in the office, that was it. I’ve already, as of November of last year, I’ve gone ahead and bought 55 tablets and every single person in the shop is going to have a tablet moving forward. So when you talk about that investment piece, it definitely does become more comfortable when you see that there’s good results at the end of it. Right?

Cole Strandberg: No doubt. And you were able to kind of try it a little bit, sample it, if you will, before rolling that out, which is going to give you an additional level of, of comfort that’s going to be amazing now. Additional margin grab. When you talk about getting paid by insurers, you often hear documentation, documentation, documentation or some iteration of. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. Obviously in going through this process and grabbing images and documenting more and more, have you seen a difference in how insurers treat some of these conversations around you guys getting paid?

Sebastian Torres: Yeah, it’s more, it’s not so much headbutting and it’s more like just simple conversations. Like our relationships with our insureds are amazing right now. You know what I mean? Like when you can take accountability for yourself and say, hey, listen, if I don’t have this documented, don’t pay me. They love that. You know what I mean? Like it’s, it’s not this notion of, it’s, you know, the body shops versus insurance. Like I might put a target on my back for some people, but I don’t know, I don’t believe in it. You know what I mean? We’re all on the same team. At the other end of that screen is another human that just needs to make sure they’re doing their job correctly. Right. And they can’t be doing you any favors. So if they go ahead and approve something that’s not documented, then guess what, their manager is going to come down on them and it’s going to be a whole other issue for them. So we need to keep it honest. And, and the conversations have been very smooth because if we have the documentation, I can pick up a the phone and say, hey, you know, can you have a conversation with this image desk appraiser? Like we’re, we’re having a little bit of a hard time and 9 out of 10 times it goes through and then when we don’t have the documentation, we don’t even call. We just, you know, the review desk knows that they need to remove it and we go back to the shop and say, hey, you could have made X amount of money but instead you didn’t. You know, because you didn’t have the right documentation for it.

Cole Strandberg: Documentation, man, it’s important. I love it. Anytime whether it’s M and A integration or new product rollout within a company or even a new company policy, there’s often blowback, whether minor or major from your team or resistance in adopting this new technology. You obviously had a couple leaders internally in your. In your trial run, if you will, kind of champion the product and learn it, and people you could rely on to kind of sing the right song off the right song sheet to the rest of the team. How did the team’s adoption of some of these new processes, procedures and technologies go from your perspective?

Sebastian Torres: Very good. You know what? I’m blessed with a really, really good team. Like, we really. There’s no animosity, there’s no pushback. I could honestly go up to my shops tomorrow and say, we’re all wearing clown shoes for work and everybody’s going to do it. You know what I mean? Like, we work as a team. There is no my way or the highway. I make sure everybody’s involved in the processes. I explain everybody the why. Because the why is very important. You know, you don’t just want to hear an instruction and not know where you’re going. And everybody’s always on board. You know what I mean? Like, our trouble isn’t the pushback for implementation. Our trouble is the consistency. Right. But, you know, that trouble will be present with us as well as any other person that tries to do a procedure. It’s about not giving up.

Cole Strandberg: There we go. Now, as this is being rolled out across the company, the investment’s been made, but obviously you want to keep your finger on the pulse of. All right, are these processes and procedures dialed in as best as they can be or certainly at least a minimum level of acceptance? From your perspective, are there any dashboards or KPIs that you’re monitoring? Call it weekly or monthly to make sure that, all right, things are working as they’re intended. Or, hey, good news or bad news, we found some opportunity for improvement.

Sebastian Torres: Yeah. So the biggest thing is, one of the things we were doing up until the last quarter of last year was operations calls and shop audits. Right. So weekly operations calls are important. That way, you’re measuring the cars that are being delivered, you’re measuring the money that’s coming in. So what that lets you do is, okay, if you see that, you know, for example, your budget was $15,000 for Monday and they brought in 4:45, you got to give a call to the shop and say, hey guys, you had a killer day. But what happened? You know what I mean? Like, if you’re scheduling correctly, we shouldn’t be tripling our sales for one day. Like, that’s just overloading production and the office. Right. People might be happy because it’s like, yeah, they went over budget. I don’t. If I make a budget, I don’t really want you to be a hero and go over it. You know what I mean? Like, the budget is what it is and we’re going to control the numbers that we way. So my team knows that. So those are like a little bit of the checks and balances that we’re doing with the new tablet progress. What happened was we had to take all the tablets back and we had to set them up in hex node. So the setting up of all of that infrastructure has taken us about a month and a half to two months. And we’re really ready to roll out for next week. The problem is with us removing those tablets, we immediately saw a decrease in our or an increase in length of rental and a decrease in our touchdown. So the proof is in the pudding, man. Like, it works. Yeah.

Cole Strandberg: Right there, Right there you see a.

Sebastian Torres: Decline and then as soon as we put them back on, you’re going to start seeing an incline again. So it’s incredible.

Cole Strandberg: That is crazy. What a cool. Very clear. Right in front of your eyes example on the effectiveness of this technology, of your processes and procedures, all of this combined. Obviously you mentioned up front you guys grew really quickly, but methodically you’re opening up store number five. How does all of this make you feel from a foundation perspective and your ability to keep growing? Does this give you more confidence to say, let’s put the pedal down on growth?

Sebastian Torres: Yeah, 100%. We have about 11 employees now in our management group that manages the stores. Along the way, we’re going to have a vice president of operations coming up soon. So what that’s going to allow me to do is just focus on the growth and have somebody focus on operations. Right. So we’re really starting to create a unit that is all moving in the same direction. You know, like, we all just want to grow. We all want to be a part of it. We all believe in what we’re doing. So definitely the confidence is there.

Cole Strandberg: I love it, man. Well, you’ve been extremely generous with your time. It’s a fun story. You’re a fun guy to talk to. I want to end us with kind of one broader question and then go ahead and get Your contact information for anybody who wants to reach out, learn more about your business, you personally, the technology and the processes we’re talking about. But that is very simply, before we get there, what’s next for the Car Star Tour Cam Group?

Sebastian Torres: Yeah, so that’s, that’s part of phase two that we’re talking about. And of course we’re in the middle of opening up the fifth location and trying to get that stuff done, but procedures can’t stop. They don’t stop. So that triage system that we have in place of calling the customer in, I really think we’re going to get away from that. I think the AI is very smart. Now we’re at about, you know, 75 to 78% confidence, sometimes even higher depending on the hit. So for those drivable cars, I feel pretty confident that we don’t need to have the customer in anymore and we’re just going to start sending them out some, some links so that they can hopefully take their own pictures and run it and we can just book them for the repair with the parts right away. That’s kind of what the next step for the group is. And I think that’s going to help us elevate the customer service because nobody has time to go back to a shop twice or three times. Right.

Cole Strandberg: Or certainly not the patients. Absolutely. This customer satisfaction, we talk about it all the time. Expectations are high. If you can meet them or exceed them, you’re going to be in a great position to continue that growth, continue that great reputation. But man, it’s been an absolute pleasure. Sebastian, for folks who want to follow along with your journey or get in touch with you, how can they do it?

Sebastian Torres: I would say send me an email. I can, I can put my email down. I’m always happy to reply to emails and if somebody wants to set up a call or if they need anything, then, you know, we can go from there.

Cole Strandberg: But I’ll be sure to put that in the show notes so we’ll make that easy for folks. Sebastian, man, an absolute pleasure. Looking forward to following along with your journey and let’s catch up soon after store number five is open after these 55 tablets are rocking and rolling. Really appreciate you joining us here on the Collision Vision.